My Favorite Reads of 2013

by Elizabeth Zelvin

I read twenty books I loved last year and started close to 150 that I didn't finish, not to mention a number of books, some the latest in series by well-known authors, that failed to engage my interest more than marginally: I slogged through those over periods up to two weeks of bedtime reading, since they reliably made me drowsy.

Here are the twenty books that were winners for me. Note that my tastes are as idiosyncratic as those of any reader. They run to intelligent writing, strong voice, endearing characters, clever dialogue, and plausible relationships. Given those elements, I'm looking for a plot that keeps moving, though not necessarily at breakneck pace.

In alphabetical order:

Maggie Barbieri, Once Upon A Lie, 2013
A beautifully worked out unreliable narrator mystery with a likable protagonist. If this is the first in a series, I'll definitely read the next one, and I plan to go back and try the author's earlier work.

PM Carlson, Rehearsal for Murder, 1988
PM Carlson, Murder Unrenovated, 1988
PM Carlson, Murder is Pathological, 1986
I know Pat Carlson from Sisters in Crime, but I hadn't read her Maggie Ryan novels until Jim Huang, a small press publisher and bookseller as well as a Mister Sister, started re-issuing them in e-editions. They typify the character-driven traditional mystery that's so hard to get published nowadays, with the added twist--unusual but not unique--of not making Maggie herself a point of view character.

Jane Casey, The Last Girl, 2013
Jane Casey, The Burning, 2012
Jane Casey, The Reckoning, 2012
I read the latest first and liked it enough to go back to the beginning of the series. Maeve Corrigan is an Irish detective constable in London. Nice balance between police procedural and character arc, reminiscent of Deborah Crombie's Kincaid/Gemma James series. Some might compare her to Elizabeth George, but George's latest was one of those books that took me forever to finish because it kept putting me to sleep, on top of irritating me with its many implausabilities; I think it's time for me to give up on George.

Anne Cleeland, Murder in Thrall, 2013
Another Irish detective constable heroine at Scotland Yard, another British lord turned copper like George's Lynley, a satisfying police procedural--and the most unusual love story I've come across in ages. The author takes a big risk and pulls it off beautifully. The sequel is due this summer, and I'm looking forward to it.

Deborah Crombie, The Sound of Broken Glass, 2013
A long-running series of character-driven police procedurals that's still getting better and better. You may be getting the impression that I'm a fan of police procedurals, but in fact, what I care about is the authenticity and appeal of the characters and their relationships.

Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling), The Cuckoo’s Calling, 2013
I didn't read this, in fact, didn't hear about it, till the news that Galbraith was JK Rowling broke, but I adored it and can't wait for the sequel. A tremendously appealing private eye and sidekick and a solid mystery. Rowling more than makes up for the absence of endearing characters in her first post-Harry Potter novel, The Casual Vacancy. I think she's amply proved her point about the publishing industry in the 21st century (sales not pegged to merit) and her own talent (shining through).

Michael Gruber, The Return, 2013
I've read everything by this brilliant and too often overlooked thriller writer. He's got it all: storytelling, writing, and characterization. This one whips together an old secret from the Vietnam war, a protagonist with terminal cancer, and a couple of Mexican drug cartels. I found it a little more lightweight and breezy than his last, the acclaimed The Good Son, and Publisher's Weekly and Booklist weren't kind to it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Laurie R. King, Touchstone, 2008
I reread this suspense novel set in 1926 Britain on the brink of a general strike in anticipation of the 2013 sequel and found it just as brilliant and absorbing as I did the first time. Disappointingly, I didn't like the sequel. I found protagonist Harris Stuyvesant much less sympathetic on his second outing, which illuminated for me why I don't share the general nostalgia for and fascination with the expatriate artists' and writers' Paris in the 1920s: it's a boys' club. A few rich lesbians had a lot of fun, but straight women's main function was to sleep with the boys. This feminist says, "Yuck."

William Kent Krueger, Tamarack County, 2013
Not my usual kind of read, but the medium-boiled Cork O'Connor series, set in northern Minnesota with a fine sense of place and great sensitivity to Native American issues along with solid plotting, has kept me reading forward and going back to earlier books. I didn't like Krueger's other 2013 book, a literary sort of crime-fiction standalone that others raved about, nearly as well. Kent Krueger himself is one of the nicest people in the mystery community.

Jenny Milchman, Cover of Snow, 2013
An unusually suspenseful debut with a slam-bang opening and a superbly well realized cold-weather setting in upstate New York.

Naomi Novik, Blood of Tyrants, 2013
A superb series in the speculative fiction/alternative history genres: the Napoleonic era with dragons. The dragon Temeraire himself is high on my list of lovable protagonists. This one is the eighth and next to last in the series. Peter Jackson has optioned the books for the movies, and he'd do a great job.

Sara Paretsky, Critical Mass, 2013
Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski's special brand of brainy and tough in the sixteenth in this terrific series that smashed through the gender barrier in private eye fiction.

Linda Lee Peterson, The Devil’s Interval, 2013
Linda Lee Peterson, Edited to Death, 2005
I fell in love with the voice in the second of these traditional mysteries featuring journalist/editor Maggie Fiori and had to go back and read the first one. The wisecracking dialogue and vein of real feeling underneath the fun reminded me of my own Bruce Kohler series. I got the impression the author must be my kind of woman.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, Through the Evil Days, 2013
This traditional mystery series featuring clergywoman/combat vet Rev. Clare Fergusson and police chief Russ Van Alstyne is deservedly a multiple award winner. The author once again offers a masterful blend of suspense, love story, and social issues as she sends her protagonists on a life-threatening honeymoon.

Elizabeth Zelvin, Voyage of Strangers, 2013
Yes, this one is mine: my historical novel about what really happened when Columbus discovered America, from the outsider perspective of a young marrano sailor. Sequel to an Agatha-nominated story that first appeared in EQMM. I did read it more than once in 2013, and I do love the characters and the story.

MLK and Navajo Voting

The great Martin Luther King Jr.

 Monday we celebrated Martin Luther King Day—even here in the great state of Arizona, which was a bit late on the uptake.

The great Tony Hillerman

 Additionally:  Over the years, I’ve tremendously enjoyed Tony Hillerman’s series of mystery novels set against the backdrop of the Diné people and their Navajo Nation, as well as its surrounding states. Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee need no explanation here, certainly. And I’m sure you are as impressed by Hillerman’s knowledge of Navajo (Diné) lore and custom as I.

 Thus, at the close of this work week, which kicked off with the celebration of Martin Luther King Day, I think it appropriate to mention—here on Sleuth Sayers—the impact I recently learned Martin Luther King’s work had on the lives of Navajos, and other Native Americans, in my own state of Arizona.

 I was surprised to learn, this week, something I’m ashamed I didn’t already know. And, it’s something I don’t recall having read about in Hillerman’s work (though he may actually touch on it, because, as frequent readers know, my memory can be a bit faulty at times).

 Prior to this week, however, I’m embarrassed to tell you, I didn’t know that Navajos were not permitted to vote in state or federal elections, in Arizona, until 1948. In fact, NO American Indians living on reservations in Arizona were able to vote until then.

 It might be pointed out, incidentally, that this was years after many Navajos and other tribal members had fought for our country in both world wars. Even more unsettling, Navajos did not generally turn out to vote (or even register) in large numbers, until after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed.

And, with good reason! 

To understand why, we need to take a quick tour through the history of Native American citizenship.

 Much of the problem stems from the fact that “Indian Reservations” were established in a manner that made them, legally speaking, sovereign nations within the borders of the United States. This is how the phrase “Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations, among the several states, and with the Indian tribes,” found its way into the constitution.

 For this reason, until 1924, Native Americans living on reservations were not recognized as United States citizens. Prior to this time, American Indians were denied citizenship (including the right to vote) unless the tribe they were part of arranged a special treaty or agreement with the federal government, or they underwent a process of individual naturalization, which required renouncing tribal citizenship, severing tribal ties, and demonstrating that the person in question had assimilated into what one might call “Euro-American” culture.

 After Native Americans served in World War I, however, popular opinion led the U.S. Congress to pass the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Though this act technically granted U.S. citizenship to American Indians living on reservations, several states still managed to refuse them the vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests were just a few of the ways states accomplished this.

 In Arizona, however, a different method was applied. Shortly after the Indian Citizenship Act was passed, the Arizona Supreme Court, in the case of Porter v. Hall, upheld a state-wide prohibition against Native American voting, stating that American Indians living on reservations were wards of the federal government, making them “persons under guardianship.” Since “persons under guardianship” could not vote, it was a slam-dunk; Navajos and other American Indians living on reservations in Arizona were denied the ballot.

 This embargo would remain in effect until the Arizona Supreme Court overturned the Porter v. Hall decision, in 1948. At which point, the state imposed a literacy test to deter American Indians (among other minorities) from going to the polls.

And, things stayed this way until 1965. 

Though the Voting Rights Act (VRA)—which Martin Luther King was so instrumental in helping to bring to fruition in August of 1965—may certainly be felt to have deep roots in Selma, Alabama, the law also applied to important areas of Arizona that had large numbers of Navajo voters.

 At the time the VRA was passed, only those American Indians who could (1) read the United States Constitution in English and (2) write their names, were eligible to vote in Arizona polling places.

 The VRA, however, included Section 5: a temporary prohibition of literacy tests in certain jurisdictions. Consequently, Navajo, Coconino and Apache Counties, in Arizona became covered by Section 5 of the VRA, and literacy tests were suspended.

If you compare the map of Arizona counties, above, with the map of the Navajo Nation, below, you should get a good idea of how the reservation lands overlap the counties in question.

 But not for long, because the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia soon held that Arizona’s literacy test had not been discriminatorily applied against American Indians in the last five years.

 This ruling would stand until the VRA’s Section 5 was amended in 1970 to include a nationwide ban on literacy tests. And, Apache, Navajo and Coconino Counties—along with five other Arizona counties—once again became covered under Section 5 of the VRA, throwing out the use of literacy tests.

Yet, more struggles were to come.

 In 1972, in Apache County, the first reservation Navajo ran for public office in a non-reservation governmental body in Arizona. Apache County’s population was predominately Navajo at the time. And, when Tom Shirley ran for the District 3 seat on the Apache County Board of Supervisors, he decisively defeated his white opponent—only to find himself blocked from taking office.

 Officials argued that Navajos weren’t really U.S. citizens (that sovereign nation thing again) and thus could not hold office. The court battle dragged on until the Arizona Supreme Court ruled, in September of 1973, that American Indians living on reservations were fully qualified to hold public office. Thus, the first Navajo member of the 3-person Apache County Board of Supervisors finally took office nine months after his term was supposed to have begun.

 Though Shirley did not run for re-election in 1976, he was instrumental in fighting an attempt to gerrymander the county’s districts—a plan clearly designed to limit future Navajo representation on the Board of Supervisors. A federal court finally stepped in, citing the VRA, and Shirley’s fight was won. Consequently, the results of the 1976 election saw two of the thee Supervisor seats filled by Navajos.

 In 1974, federal observers monitoring the election in Apache County, for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, noticed a lack of polling places and a greater need for ballot translation. According to the report, these problems resulted in long lines that made people wait hours to cast their ballots, some waiting until after midnight.

 Congress amended the VRA to address these issues in 1975.

 The problems, however, continue. Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, was quoted in a recent Arizona Republic article as saying: “It’s not history. There’s still a mentality that Indians need to stay on the reservation.”

 She added that the Arizona Speaker of the House, in 2003, asked the state attorney general if Navajos could legally serve on state commissions. “It’s just a very odd, backward way of thinking,” she said.

 Perhaps the Speaker had never heard of the Arizona Supreme Court decision dealing with Tom Shirley. I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t either, until this past week—though, as a guy who’s part Choctaw and Chickasaw, I’ve also never thought American Indians “need to stay on the reservation.”

I’ll see you in two weeks!
— Dixon

That "Eureka" Moment

by Brian Thornton

That "Eureka" moment. Some people are familiar with it. Others crave it and yet don't know what it's called. Or they know about the notion of a "Eureka" moment without truly understanding what it is or how it works.

A quick search (thanks a bunch, Pegasus Project!) gives us the following: "'Eureka' comes from the Ancient Greek word εὕρηκα heúrēka, meaning "I have found (it)", which is the first person singular perfect indicative active of the verb heuriskō "I find".

And of course there is the famous story of how it entered the public consciousness, how the Greek

Archimedes, I feel your pain, big guy....

"natural philosopher" and mathematician Archimedes was wrestling with a problem, sitting in his bath mulling it, and had that flash of inspiration where the blinders were removed from his eyes, he "saw" the problem and the answer all in one brilliant moment of what many would call "divine inspiration". And so he hopped out of his bath and ran down the streets of his native city of Syracuse, naked, shouting (you guessed it: "EUREKA!").

I had one of those this morning.

And it was everything I thought it could be.

Now, I believe those folks who preach that success in writing, as with many creative endeavors, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Hard work trumps flights of fancy, and pays off damned near every time.

A good friend of mine from both high school and grad school was one of those "inspiration" guys. This guy is a certified genius. I think of the ancient Roman definition of "genius" (hey, they invented the word, after all), how it was supposedly a household spirit that would occasionally whisper in your ear, and I swear that my friend must have inherited Einstein's household spirit. He's that brilliant. I could sit with him and listen to him reel off creative idea after creative idea after creative idea. He had more Eureka moments in one sitting than I've had during my entire life.

And he's never done a damned thing with it. Not. One. Thing.

I know a number of people on the other end of the spectrum- hard workers who have fashioned incredibly successful writing careers for themselves- grinders who put in the time, do the work, meet that deadline. And I am happy for each and every one of them.

I look back on my own career and really do see myself as a member of the latter category. I like to think of myself as hard-working when it comes to my writing, even diligent. I'm one of those grinders. I am proud of the hard work I've done.

And yet I have had those "Eureka" moments.

Not many of them. And certainly never enough to suit me. But each time I had one I was really, deeply, profoundly stuck. Then in a flash I get the sudden inspiration popping up in my head seemingly out of nowhere, and presto! I've got it1 Eureka! And the world changes.

But none of these moments has been more welcome than the one I had this morning, driving to work. Out of nowhere I had the solution to the problem that had me stuck in neutral on this project for months!

EUREKA!

And what caused it? Was I able to precipitate it? I think what brought about this happy event was a confluence of factors:

1. The long illness from which I've suffered since early Autumn has (finally) begun to wane. Being sick? Hell of a distraction!

2. I went back through the work-in-progress to help me get the story straight in my head.

3. I went back and re-read every story fragment, outline, plot idea written on a cocktail napkin in my possession.

One, all or some esoteric combination of these factors somehow helped unlock the door to my internal inspiration, and at 7:57 AM PST this morning (Yes, I actually checked the time when it happened, I was SO THRILLED), I had it:

EUREKA!

And aside from the solution to my long-standing plotting problem, my Eureka moment has helped drive home to me the reality that, while inspiration might well be just "one percent" of the creative process, it's a pretty damned important, well-nigh irreplaceable, one percent of that process.

Because without it, we're all just really hard workers.

So how about the rest of you? Got a particular Eureka moment you'd like to share?

The 4th Wall

I wrote a story awhile back called "The Devil to Pay" and, at the end, Tommy is visiting his grandmother, who's living in a nursing home.

It's a beautiful fall day, crisp and clear, with just enough breeze off the river that she needs a lap robe. He's pushing her around the grounds in her wheelchair. The gravel on the path crunches underfoot. He's telling her a story, full of gangsters and gunrunners. She doesn't really follow it. Too complicated, too many foreign names, too many people she doesn't know.

The point, of course, is that he's telling her the story you've just read. There's a term for his, and I believe it's called metafiction– correct me if I'm wrong– meaning a narrative that's self-referential, where you play with convention, and the story comments on its own structure or dynamic. This, in turn, got me thinking about breaking the Fourth Wall.

Hamlet begins his story by addressing the audience, "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt…" Richard III does the same, "Now is the winter of our discontent…" Macbeth, after he first meets the witches: "If chance will have me king…" In each case, they don't step out of character, in fact, the reverse, but they step out of the play, to invite us into their confidences, and make us complicit in what follows. The soliloquy is a dramatic device going back to the earliest theater, but Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan playwrights, like Marlowe, use it in a very specific way, to enter a character's thoughts.

The equivalent these days would be first-person narration, where whoever's telling the story let's you know what's going on in their head, or admits they don't in fact know what's going on. MAGNUM P.I. often used voice-over, and one common phrase Magnum was fond of, as he went off on some errand you knew could only lead to trouble, was "I know what you're thinking, but–" This is actually a variation on a Victorian literary trope, had-he-but-known. Nor were the Victorians at all

embarrassed by addressing you directly: "And now, Dear Reader, we must leave this scene, and return to…" whatever it is. Dickens does it all the time. So does Trollope. The effect is to make you a party to the machinery, or joinery, and remind that this is all invention. It removes you from the fiction, so to speak, that the story is accidental.

We follow certain conventions, and I think rightly, because we assume a bargain between the writer and the reader, and you basically have to play fair. It doesn't mean you can't have an unreliable narator, or be deceptive, or simply mischievous, but the reader understands you're in collusion with each other. He or she surrenders to the illusion in hopes of being entertained, or invigorated, puzzled, or shocked, or surprised, even transported. When do you break the rules? In effect, only when you have the reader's permission. If you step out from behind the curtain, you have to do it in good faith. "I know what you're thinking, but---" In other words, the reader is your accomplice.

The trick, really, if I can put it that way, lies in not losing the reader's confidence. When you do close-up card magic, for example, the distinction is between the "effect," the agreed-upon narrative, what the audience sees, and the "sleight," meaning the method you use to pull it off. This is known in magic circles as misdirection, but the audience is asking to be fooled.

This is part of the bargain, that you enter into a world of masks, and the writer can let the mask slip, if you have what amounts to informed consent. You're dealing from a marked deck. The reader accepts this, if the narrative is convincing, and the sleight of hand reinforces it. What your reader won't forgive is the loss of trust. You've invited them in, after all, and they've made the choice to be included, to inhabit the fiction, the understanding that you'll give good weight. You promise, across the footlights, to make mad the guilty, and appall the free, unpack your heart with words. They'll take you up on it.

Elegy

                                            She stands in the cold water, facing

                                            south toward an invisible island. 

                                            In the Sunday morning quiet 

                                            the redwing blackbirds 

                                            shuffle nervously in a thicket 

                                            behind the beach. The loon 

                                            makes no sound at all in its 

                                            purposeful passage. 

                                            For sixty years and more 

                                            she has tested the waters 

                                            this way. Soon she will 

                                            take the plunge. Intrepid swimmer. 

                                            For her there is never 

                                            backing out. Never. She will dive 

                                            into the salt waves and there will be 

                                            friendliness and fellowship and 

                                            sisterhood, and a spot of

                                            solitude. 

                                            Her landlocked husband, a creature of air 

                                            and dirt, leans against a boulder 

                                            and watches her. His silence 

                                            goes with her, and with the loon. 

                                            He guards towel, glasses, sandals, 

                                            His heart flutters in the thicket. 

                                            He rests quietly at the margin 

                                            of the liquid world, waiting. 

                                            When she rises, rebaptized, 

                                            from the sea, she will find 

                                            a harbor here. 

                                                                    James Lowell McPherson 

                                                                    "She Stands in the Cold Water"

       Last month I posted an article that largely praised the wonders of computerized research and our ability today to secure virtually any bit of information by merely clicking the correct keys on the nearest available laptop. At the time I wrote that post I intended to also address the flip side of the equation -- the things that we lose as we spiral down into that all-knowing ethernet vortex. But I have this problem (likely already evident) -- once I get started I can have a tendency to “write long.” The previous article sort of outgrew itself, leaving no practical room for a second chapter.  Also I came to realize that the rest of what I had to say was not only about losing the more personal side of the research process, but about losing people themselves.

       As noted in that previous article, ready access to the troves of information now available on the internet comes at a cost -- studies indicate a trend toward the reduction, and at times near disappearance, of short term and long term memory. As we come to rely on information assembled and cataloged on the internet more and more, our need to store facts in memory decreases, as does our ability to do so. What we potentially lose when this happens is the personal clothing that facts otherwise wear; the human side of the dry answer. 

       Dr. Kathryn Walbert, a professor at North Carolina University, has set the stage for the problem we face: 

Historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can rely on extensive correspondence and regular diary entries for information about life in the past. But in today’s world, telephone, email, and web-based communication have largely replaced those valuable written records. Without oral history, much of the personal history of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be lost to future historians.

       Now we risk losing even that if personal memories, anecdotes and remembrances, upon which oral histories are based, are no longer being retained by our galloping brains, which have concluded this congeries of entangled memories and recollections need no longer be stored. 

       And what do we risk losing, here? How better to illustrate than with an anecdote. 

Jim and Phyllis
on the deck of the Mandalay

     Twenty-eight years ago my wife and I were on a Windjammer cruise -- 14 days, Antigua to Grenada, all under sail on a lovely ship that held 74 lucky passengers. The first night, at dinner, I glanced over at the couple sitting next to us and did a double take. They were in their sixties (to our 30s). He had shoulder length hair tied in a ponytail and sported a full beard; she had waist length hair. Both were dressed in tie-dye. Wow, I thought.  Relics of the '60s!  These are folks I need to meet.  

       That encounter, on the tall ship Mandalay, was the beginning to a 25 year friendship with two of the most interesting people we ever knew. 

       I referenced Jim McPherson and his wife Phyllis King in that previous article, specifically in reference to Jim's amazing facility with words.  Both Phyllis and Jim were poets, each an observer of all things past and present, and each a raconteur of the many adventures and lessons they had experienced in their varied lives. Over the years we spent many more vacations with Phyllis and Jim. And when they came down to Washington D.C. from their New York City apartment on Riverside Drive for visits we would spend memorable evenings in our backyard, or in our living room, drinking scotch and regaling each other with stories and observations. 

       One of the things I did not mention in that previous post was that Phyllis worked for twenty-five years at the telephone reference desk at the New York City library. I do not know how that desk is now run, but in the day -- in her day -- anyone could call in with a question and be assured that, for the number of minutes allotted each call by the library rules, the caller would have the undivided attention of a library employee who was both knowledgeable and willing to help them find the information that they sought. 

       All of this does tie back to our theme here. And here we go.

       In 1989 a short article by the well-known author and photographer Stanley P. Friedman appeared in The New York Times, The article was also published in the December 1990 edition of Reader's Digest, from which I quote. 

       I needed to do some research for an article I was writing, so I called New York City’s library information service. A woman whose mellifluous voice I’ve recognized for years came on. Her willingness to help has been boundless. “What do you want?” she asked.

       “I don’t think you’d have it. It’s sheet music. I need lyrics.”

       “Which?”

       “It’s a ‘40s song: ‘Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.’”

       “Oh, yes. That’s from a Deanna Durbin movie.”

       Pause. And then, would you believe it, she started singing it to me. Mind you, sing, not recite. The lyrics tripped along swiftly.

       They took me back to the London that I was writing about. September 1944. V-2s in blossom.... We met in the Strand Palace Hotel bar. We were both lonely and 19. We went to see Christmas Holiday with Deanna Durbin. She sang “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.”

       End of flashback. Back to the Singing Librarian. At song’s end I said: “That was beautiful. You broke my heart. But you’ll have to say the words slowly so I can write them down.”

       She did, I wrote, then I asked, “What’s your name?”

       “We’re not allowed to give that information.”

       “That’s okay,” I said. “I know you.”

        So do I.  No rules here:  That was Phyllis King. 

       Google will give you the lyrics to that Deanna Durbin song, but there is so much more that it will not be able to do. Life has a poetry to it that is beyond Google’s keen.  And that is what we risk losing.

Thomas Point Lighthouse

       Phyllis died in 2007. Jim brought her ashes, encased in a brightly colored origami wrapper of corrugated paper, down to Washington, D.C., and with him we struck out on our 1982 Carver, motoring up the Chesapeake Bay to Thomas Point Light. As Amazing Grace played over our speakers we set the origami boat afloat in the Bay. It bobbed a few times, testing the water, and then pointed down, just as Phyllis always did, and dove for the depths. 

       One year later Jim died. His ashes are spread on the shore, looking out toward the waters of Thomas Point Light. There with the boulders. Watching. 

                                                When I am gone

                                                I will not haunt 

                                                with sad face 

                                                and mournful cries. 

                                                I will follow you like a child’s balloon 

                                                bobbing at your shoulder, 

                                                bumping your face 

                                                with my red or pink 

                                                or blue surface, 

                                                touching you, 

                                                saying I am there.

                                                              Phyllis King 

                                                              "Early Morning Balloon Poem"

                                                              November 10, 2005

Looking Around

and I saved the best for last.  Please scroll down.

This was too good to resist after reading John's column on rejection a few weeks ago and Dixon's last week.    

Until we meet again, take care of … you!

Fertility Fraud

by Leigh Lundin

The Switch, Part I

Bill Manser and Elizabeth Sehr © MGM

Today’s article was suggested by a friend and neighbor. (Thanks, B!) The story involves Florida (where else!), DNA, and a man who spent half a decade in prison. And it’s about hubris.

In 1995, DNA lab worker Elizabeth Sehr submitted evidence for a paternity test involving William Manser. According to The Libertarian Republic and The Orlando Sentinel, Manser missed a court date and, when he failed to pay court-ordered child support for young Dylan Sehr, was sentenced to prison and served five years.

Bill Manser did not recall taking a DNA test and he expressed doubt the child was his. After prison, he built a relationship with Dylan and had at least one son with someone else. Then, two decades after Dylan’s birth, along comes a television program that combines those two favorites of daytime television, courtroom drama and paternity testing. (And people wonder why I don’t own a television.)

The program is called Paternity Court. It’s presided over by entertainer, lawyer, and dazzling drama queen Lauren Lake. I’ll be the first to admit it feels tawdry, even unseemly, but the show solved a riddle no one else seemed interested in resolving.

• The result was that Bill Manser was sent to prison on a lie. He was not the father.
• The broader implication is that lab technician Elizabeth Sehr either substituted the real father’s DNA or faked the test paperwork.

Less than a minute after the revelation, Lake asked Elizabeth if she knew who the real father was and Sehr readily admitted she remains in touch with him– then twenty seconds later complained Manser had called her a liar. In the build-up, the viewer experienced a sound dose of Sehr stridently insisting Manser’s the liar, that he’s a father avoiding responsibility. And we can’t forget she complained he wasn’t there for her son in his young years… completely overlooking she’d sent him to prison.

The mother blames LabCorp for ‘a mix-up’ and her son has said LabCorp should be held responsible. You don’t need a background in science to see what’s wrong with this rationale. If a lab failed to match, that might (or not) be considered a mix-up. But since the lab was able to identify the father’s DNA (if not his actual name), we know the real father’s DNA was in that lab, and there’s only one way it could have been placed there. Either that, or she faked the entire test.

What a plot for a murder mystery. But in case you think DNA might hold no more surprise, read on.

The Switch, Part II

Tom Lippert © KUTV 2014

Following a DNA test, the Branum family was surprised to learn Mr. Branum was not the father of daughter Annie. Before jumping to conclusions about Mrs. Branum, know that Annie was conceived in a fertility clinic. She was an in vitro test tube baby where a clinic affiliated with the University of Utah collected spermatozoa and eggs from Mr. and Mrs. Branum.

So the mother, Pam Branum, started detective work with the help of genetic genealogist, CeCe Moore, who tells the tale in her blog (with altered names). The story centers around Tom Lippert, a brilliant but troubled student who decades earlier had kidnapped and electroshocked a girl in the hope she might fall in love with him. After a term in prison, he returned to school and worked for nine years at the lab associated with the University of Utah.

• UU has proved less than cooperative, but it appears Lippert substituted his semen sample for that belonging to Mr. John Branum. 
• It’s suspected Lippert may have supplanted dozens or even hundreds of semen collections over the years at the university clinic.

Lippert is long dead, but his legacy lives on.

DNA can resolve many mysteries, but it’s also possible for DNA tests to uncover entirely new puzzles.